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January 13th, 2009:

Iowa Prison to Grant Email Privileges to Inmates

Jan 13th, 2009
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The inmates of Mitchellville State Women’s Prison are in for a treat. Iowa’s Department of Corrections recently launched a project that allows them to correspond with their friends and family via email. No, they will not be given Macbooks or BlackBerry devices. The new project only allows the inmates to receive email messages, not send them.

Receiving email messages

Because a set of computer work stations with highly secured software is yet to be installed in the correctional facility, the email privilege given to the inmates will only be one-way. Although they have to deal with the fact that they can only receive and not send any email messages to their friends and loved ones for now, the inmates in Mitchellville may be granted additional email privileges in the future. After all, the creative team from Advanced Technologies Group of West Des Moines is currently working on a new system that will allow the inmates to not only receive and read but compose and send emails as well.

If the new system fails to develop, the Iowa-based firm already has an alternative method in mind. According to chief executive officer Atul Gupta, the inmates may just write their messages on bar-coded papers that will be scanned before they are forwarded to their respective recipients via email.

Screening incoming messages

To ensure that each email is in compliance with the security requirements of the correctional, the prison officials will screen all incoming messages via a computer. After checking the content of the emails, the prison officials will then print a copy of each email and deliver them personally to the inmates. The Mitchellville inmates, therefore, will only read their email messages from a printout and not a computer.

Bomb Threats Sent to Leela Hotels via Email

Jan 13th, 2009
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Explosive devices have been planted in every single Leela Hotel in India. Or so the email says. The bomb threat, which was sent to the management office of Leela Hotel in Mumbai, is claiming that the anonymous senders will blow up each and every Leela Hotel in the country if the owners fail to pay off the Rs 42 lakh ransom that they are asking for.

Searching for explosive devices

Upon receiving the email, the personnel of the Leela Hotel in Mumbai immediately alerted the Bomb Detection and Disposal Squad regarding the bomb threat. After a detailed search all over the hotel, the squad discovered that there were no explosive devices planted in the building. Not a single bomb was found. The email, therefore, was more of a bluff than a threat.

Tracking down email origin

Because it was sent using the payingtime@gmail.com email address, the email threat was obviously forwarded using Google’s Gmail webmail service. The investigators also found out that the management of the Leela Hotel in Mumbai is not the only recipient of the email threat. In fact, it was revealed that the email threat was also sent to the respective email addresses of the Leela Hotel management in Bangalore, Goa, and Kerala.

Fortunately for the owners of the Leela Group of Hotels, the investigators have already tracked down the original location of the email threat by simply tracing the details of its Internet protocol (IP) address. Surprisingly, the IP address was traced to two countries: Kenya and United Arab Emirates (UAE). Since the UAE is a major Internet Exchange Point (IXP) for Kenyan ISPs, the anonymous senders of the email probably forwarded the message to India from Kenya using an IP address from the Middle East.

Archbishop Tutu Involved in Email Scam

Jan 13th, 2009
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Nobody is safe from being victimized by an email scam. Not even Desmond Mpilo Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Archbishop Emeritus of South Africa. A new fraudulent email claiming to be sent by the archbishop is currently invading email inboxes all over the world. The main objective of the scammers who composed and sent the email — to raise money for the archbishop’s organization.

Fraudulent email message

According to the fraudulent email, Archbishop Tutu is allegedly going through financial difficulty. The only solution he can think of to raise enough funds to save the future of his organization is to “humbly” ask for an urgent loan worth GBP1400 (R21000). He even promised to pay back the loan on February 2, 2009. To guarantee the loaners that they will be repaid, the person who originally composed the fraudulent message even attached a fake cheque on the fake email. Archbishop Tutu, of course, denied all claims that he has anything to do with the email message. According to the archbishop, he is not capable of writing such an awkwardly phrased letter.

Fake email address

The email address used in sending the fraudulent email is archbishopdt@mail2southafrica.com, the alleged email address of Archbishop Tutu. The said email address, however, is a fake. After all, the only institution that is allowed to seek donations and raise funds using Archbishop Tutu’s name is the Mpilo Ministries Trust. The Trust, according to the official statement issued by the archbishop, “handles fund raising through recognized institutions and would never make such public appeals for funds.”